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Websites: HTML-formatted eNewsletters
Carden Jennings Publishing was searching for new multimedia and online services that it could develop and market to its fraternal clients. While website development and redesign were obvious solutions, CJP was seeking a product that could potentially become a new niche of service offerings. Electronic publishing was an obvious venue for it to consider.
Fraternal
organizations have up to 100,000 members that they communicate with at
any given time. Their primary medium of communication is often a costly
alumni magazine that is mailed to their members three to four times a
year. To reduce costs and increase communication, CJP sought to develop
an easy way for its clients to create and distribute attractively formatted
HTML emails to their members. I was the lead developer for this project.
On previous projects, I often used an open source Perl script called SouperMail to process online forms. SouperMail could be configured to send an HTML formatted thank you email to the user, display a customized HTML thank you page for printing purposes, and to distribute the contents of the form via email to various employees for processing.
I began the process by developing three to five HTML email templates that a user could select via a simple online wizard. Each newsletter could then be customized for various purposes. Some would be used to send a simple one-story message while others would contain various stories, images, links to more information, and even attachments.
A
user would first use the wizard to select a template that best suits the
purpose of his or her message. Next, the user would then customize the
template by specifying how many stories the email would contain, by determining
if photos or attachments would be included, and by deciding if customized
greetings like "Dear John Smith" would be used.
As users made their decisions via the wizard, SouperMail would be organizing a shell version of the HTML-formatted email. Once all of the questions were answered, an empty version of the email would be displayed with empty form fields waiting for content. Users would simply cut-and-paste content into each story field, upload images and attachments, and past a CSV version of their database in the To field. When ready, the user would click Send and SouperMail would begin the process of emailing the HTML-formatted newsletter to the specified recipients.
Carden Jennings Publishing demonstrated the service at a recent conference for fraternal organizations and received much interest.
| Client: | Lambda Chi Alpha |
| Type of work: | Carden Jennings Publishing Client |
| Description: | Develop an online wizard and tool for distributing HTML-formatted emails |
| Project role: | As the lead developer, I created the HTML email templates, an online wizard, and customized an open source Perl script to distribute merged records into customized emails. I received support in configuring a Linux server to run the script and Perl assistance in making minor modifications. |
| Tools used: | Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe ImageReady, EditPlus, SouperMail |
| Languages used: | HTML, DHTML, CSS, Perl, CGI |
| Server resources: | Apache/1.3.20 (Linux/SuSE) PHP/4.0.6 on Linux |